Operation Fort Collins / Colorado is go.

To The Crystal Lakes!

Sorry for the delay in posting again, it’s been a very hectic week as always! I’ll be trying to catch up over the next few days.

First things first, Rosemary & Chris treated us to an amazing weekend in their Mountain Cabin last weekend, and we had an extremely good time. Their cabin is up in Crystal Lakes, up in the Rocky Mountains near the Wyoming Boarder. It was about a 70 minute drive from our house, and up at about 8,500 ft. This was high enough that all of the crisp packets that we had inflated like balloons…

The drive up to the cabin was very beautiful, but pretty tricky in some places. There was a lot more snow up in the mountains, and most of the roads had not been gritted or plowed in any way. We had a few little slides – nothing serious but we were definitely glad to not still be driving the Micra, which would probably have been completely under the snow…

We were blown away by the cabin when we got there, it is very beautiful. We were too distracted running around in the snow to get a good picture of the cabin, but here is a similar looking one from Google!

Like this but bigger, cooler and with more snow!

The cabin is heated primarily by a big log fire so we snuggled in front of that, but everything was very warm and there was lots of nice hot water for long showers! Chris and Rosemary have done a lot of renevation on the cabin so it is beautifully furnished and the layout is amazing. The two outer facing walls are glass, so the view of the mountains was unbelievable! It was very foggy on our first day there, but the view was still outstanding:

Very, very lovely, and only a little bit freezing cold. It was 3°F (-16°C) when we got there, so of course we went out of a nice walk with Toby the dog! It was all wonderful, and there were a lot of opportunities for great views of the mountains and of strangely placed large rocks:

Snow depth = 4 feet. Trousers = not waterproof.

We continued being happy outdoors people the next day, by going to Beaver Meadows for some cold excitement! We went Tubing, which I hadn’t tried before but was awesome fun. There were big slides formed down the snowy slopes that you could rocket down on a rubber ring like a crazy person. Extra fun came from the wind moving the snow around, so that the dividing walls kept breaking down and blowing fresh snow in your face. I screamed like a child and loved it:

Hitting the wood dividers = Epic Sad TimesTaken just before Rosemary had to dive out the way of our tube…

We kept it up for about an hour before the snow in the face started to result in complete numbness, at which point we retreated to the restaurant for hot chocolate. We choose to get the hot chocolates with a dash of peppermint schnapps, although these turned out to be about 70% schnapps. It was like drinking slightly chocolately, very thin toothpaste, but it did warm us up pretty quickly! We were all very relaxed by the time we got back to the cabin for relaxation, dinner and the movie Avatar.

The next day, we went Snowshoeing! This is where you wear snowshoes to spread your weight out a little, so that you can go hiking through very deep snow. We got to borrow some snowshoes, so strapped them on and off we went!

Our feet felt very heavy and it took us a little while to get used to walking around in them, but it was very cool once we got the hang of it! We then went for a beautiful hike around the lakes, although since all the lakes were frozen and under a few feet of snow we didn’t actually see any. I did see a Blue Jay though, so very proud of the first bird spot since we got here! We walked for a total of about two hours, and it was very pretty and very quiet. It’s actually a little eerie how quiet it is, but very relaxing. I can definitely see why authors have mountain cabin retreats for when they need to go write books, it was very serene.

We were very sad when we had to head back down to Fort Collins, although we were definitely a little relieved to be back at a lower altitude with at least some moisture in the air. We’ve offered to go and help cut down some trees if they need it sometime, so hopefully we were well behaved enough to get invited back again soon!